A. Offer something first: Allow them to feel indebted to you.

Blogging is a great way to utilize the reciprocity principle, as you are essentially giving away value for free in the form of blog posts. The challenge is to focus on being genuinely useful to your audience.

Gregory Ciotti’s Sparring Mind is a good example of great content marketing; it contains some of the most insightful articles on applied psychology in the workplace.

When your articles enable readers to yield results, they will be grateful to you and are more likely to reciprocate by providing their email addresses for future blog updates. They become valuable leads in your funnel.

Free guides on customer acquisition, support and retention can be found on the Helpscout website.

They take the game a little further by giving you access without even asking for your email address!

When you start feeling half guilty that you’re actually able to read all their beautiful articles for free, a small popup appears in the corner of your screen, promising you more weekly articles like these.

P.S. For those interested, here’s a list of 10 SEO tools that you can either try for free or at a super-cheap price.

EDIT: As Aviva Pinchas points out in the comments, HubSpot also has a website grader tool that helps you evaluate your marketing effectiveness by looking at factors like: website, social media activity, mobile responsiveness, blogging activity, email marketing, lead nurturing, and analytics.

Amazon sells an amazing selection of ebooks for their Kindle devices and apps.

Customers can choose to download a free sample of any ebook, which is the first 10% of the book. The free samples never expire, so you can keep them for as long as you like until you decide to buy the full ebook.

ButcherBox wants you to experience their high-quality home delivered meats. They have routinely offered specials that give away a cut of meat with every order. Currently, they’re offering Free Bacon For Life.

Many people find it difficult to pass up a free offer. Not to mention, the savory bacon taste is wonderful. Bacon is one cut of meat that is loved by almost all meat lovers.

This works well for ButcherBox. Their free bacon creates a motivation for customers to stay. They receive bacon for the lifetime of their subscription. Therefore, giving away some bacon allows for greater profits as customers are incentivized to continue purchasing more meat.

Oola Tea markets to its customers by giving away $10 gift cards to new customers through the referral program. They also incentivize the current customers of their product by giving them a $10 referral bonus.

Oola Tea also taps into their customer’s charitable nature. They donate to Rice bowls. Every box of tea that is purchased from Oola Tea provides a meal to a child in need.

In The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini included a study that described the principle of reciprocity. A waiter increased their tips by 3% after diners were given a free mint. They were increased by 14% when given two mints. If the waiter left one mint with the bill and returned quickly to offer a second mint, the tips increased by 23%.

This clearly demonstrates the power of an unexpected gift. As customers feel special, the chances they’ll respond favorably dramatically increase.

Recap: Remember to give first; then you shall get in return.

In order to amplify the effects of reciprocity, it is important to:

Incite the feeling of indebtedness by offering first;

Provide something exclusive and unique to the recipient so they feel special;

It gets complicated because different people have different interpretations of what “free” or “no-strings-attached” means.

For instance: can free trials really be considered a reciprocity technique?

I had an interesting conversation with Lincoln Murphy (from Sixteen Ventures) about this. In Lincoln’s view, free trials aren’t unconditional because they expire after a given time. The user is then obligated to pay to keep using the product.

This perspective is completely valid. However, in my personal experience, I’ve had instances where I felt grateful for the opportunity to use a product before buying it. So it really depends on the perspective of the end-user.

How does YOUR customer feel about what you’re offering them?

What Lincoln and I agree on completely: if an unexpected gift is given during the free trial, then that would inspire reciprocity.

Here are the other principles of influence:

Samuel Hum

As a finalist in Esquire's Best Dressed Real Man contest, Samuel is ReferralCandy's fashion eCommerce expert and resident sartorialist. He is obsessed with human behavior, social psychology, and handstands. He is also the lead calisthenics trainer at Weightless.

5 comments

This is a great topic for any business owner to understand. I’ve gotten much better results using tactics of reciprocity than anything else. The bottom line with people who don’t do it is usually “what’s in it for me?”, which tends to betray a slavish adherence to a business model that must profit on every action no matter what. It is counter intuitive to the extreme for people who think like this.

Love this list! I think another good example is Hubspot’s website grader tool. With so much content marketing out there, blog posts and eBooks can stop feeling special, that tool really stands out as a useful and unique offering.

I can definitely remember a few times where I was courted by salespeople who used reciprocity to get me hooked. There was this lady selling some sort of skin scrub who was so eager to give me a free sample, to hold my hand and rub in the moisturizer (which had grainy salts in it, which would take time to wash off… the whole time during which I had to listen to her sales pitch).

I remember very badly wanting to buy the overpriced cosmetics even though I didn’t really need it, simply because she was so nice, so engaged, attentive. Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on how you look at it?) I was a broke student with no money, so I legitimately had to leave without buying anything. And a very moisturized hand. I felt so bad!

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